High & Low Blues

Hunting blue grouse is the upland equivalent of hunting elk, including the amount of sweat and obsession. Both seasons begin in September, when grouse and elk can be found anywhere from valleys to ridgetops, usually in fairly large groups. As fall ends, both blue grouse and bull elk tend to split up, and mature males may turn as solitary as Norwegian bachelor farmers. At any given point in Rocky Mountain time, neither elk nor grouse are likely to be where even veteran hunters look for them.
    Both are also among the largest North American animals of their type, though sage grouse grow considerably larger than blues, and moose larger than elk. Luckily even the biggest blue grouse rarely weigh more than three pounds—a good thing for a middle-aged, half-reformed elk hunter. Thus, a typical three-bird limit can still fit in a generous game vest, avoiding the multiple trips (and often multiple days) involved in moving an elk from mountainside to pickup truck. It’s enough of a pain to hike up there without having the trip back down require even more effort. There’s some comfort in that, even as a blue grouse hunter’s thighs ache and lungs whine somewhere near timberline.
    This particular September day of ache-and-whine began on a stair-step ridge in western Montana, each ridgetop knob with a meadow facing the midmorning sun. This is where we expected to get the blues, as late in summer they typically mosey into the “parks” (as mountain meadows are called in the West) and pick chilled grasshoppers from the sagebrush and summer-cured grass. In September blue grouse eating grasshoppers are as predictable as bull elk bugling.
    Which is exactly what we heard soon after parking the pickup at a locked gate across a Forest Service road. If we’d been able to keep driving, the road would have taken us over the ridge and into a steep valley where several springs trickle. Bull elk like to wallow there, and blue grouse like to eat the greenery. We were loading the double guns when a faint whistle floated from the valley, softened by Douglas fir and ponderosa pine. Only the whistle made it across the ridge to our ears, not the grunts at the end of the call.
    That spring valley might have been a place to look for the blues at midday—after the sun had warmed the grasshoppers higher up and made them hard to catch—but not in the chill of an 8,000-foot morning. Instead we slowly sidehilled through shadowed timber toward the highest meadow, the half-breed bird dog running as if he’d just been released by the veterinarian. Blue grouse were one of the very first birds he’d hunted, years before, on an upland odyssey that had taken us from Montana to Michigan to Oregon to Arizona, when we’d had the pleasant task of slaying birds for my wife, Eileen, to “kitchen test” for a cookbook. That fall Gideon the “Labrasetter” had hunted a dozen species, from woodcock to sage grouse, and he seemed to remember the smells of each.
    When we walked into the sunlight of the meadow, he started quartering through the yellow grass and olive sage, snuffling the blues. We followed in a straight line, somewhat distracted by a higher vision: other ridges spreading north toward higher peaks. The near ridges were pine green, broken here and there with the yellow of other potential blue-grouse meadows. With distance, the green turned a purplish blue below raw limestone peaks whitened by the first snow of fall.
Gideon hunts like his Labrador father, loving to make birds panic into the air, but he has the nose and lean endurance of his English setter mother, handy in warm September when so many Western upland seasons open. Despite his enthusiasm, not even grasshoppers flushed from the grass. This isn’t unusual in blue grouse hunting.
    We moved through another small forest, the next step in the mountain stairway. A trail cut through the edge of the knob, the dark earth littered with “elk pies.” Soon we could see a meadow through the trees—and from the grass a dark head rose like a beaked periscope.
    The head disappeared, and Eileen walked quickly toward it. Gideon beat her there, and a big gray grouse came out of the grass like a rooster pheasant, the hard beat of its wings making it look faster than it was really flying. Which is why Eileen missed with the first barrel but killed the bird with the second. The grouse dropped in some tall sage, and all three of us could hear it hit the ground. There was the rush of a semi-setter tail, and soon Gideon emerged with his jaws across the bird’s back.
    On the low side of the meadow Gideon flushed two more blues, and I killed one. On the edge of the next timbered step Eileen took another as it started to curve around a big Douglas fir. Then we reentered the shadows, where we found one more big grouse. This one saw us first and flew into a tree. As we walked closer, it flushed downhill among the treetops, a shot rarely found even on trick-shot sporting clays courses. Neither of us even fired, but Gideon didn’t seem to place blame. Like a coyote, he’s an eternal optimist, sure of another bird somewhere.
    The last meadow didn’t hold any birds, so we dropped downhill into the timber of the main ridge and walked a faint logging trail back toward the pickup. The sweat from hunting and sun dried on our foreheads. Gideon found a tiny spring and belly-rolled in the mud. The weight in our vests felt pleasant, proving that gravity can be a good thing.
    On the drive back down the mountain we parked by a creek to clean the birds. When I walked through the grass toward the creek, several young blue grouse ran down to the bank and flew across the water and the barbed-wire fence on the other side. Of course our shotguns were cased in the pickup, and of course the fenceline had a post spray-painted orange—the legal (and oh-so-aesthetic) method of posting land in Montana.
    We cleaned the birds the old-fashioned way. Eileen used the gut hook on her pocketknife to gently start the intestines on their backward journey, and then I finished the job by hand before rinsing the cavity with creek water. At home the birds would age for a week in our refrigerator before being plucked. As I held them in the cold water, I could feel the crunch of grasshoppers in their crops.
    This is a little different than the “field-dressing” method of many Westerners. Many rip the skin off at the end of the day and then either freeze or eat the birds that night. In fact, I’ve had a few hunting companions start to rip my birds apart before I stopped them. They’d never even heard of another method. Luckily blue grouse have white flesh even more tender than that of ruffed grouse, so they still eat well when ripped apart and pan-fried while in rigor mortis—but they taste even better when  aged and plucked and cooked more gently.
    We weren’t surprised to have flushed the young blues along the creek. During mating season blue grouse live anywhere from the bottomland meadows around wheatfields and creeks to the foothills halfway up mountains. I have found turgid springtime males, hooting like strange owls at the sedate hens, everywhere from alongside valley trout streams to amid a herd of bighorn sheep.
    After the deed is done and the eggs hatch, however, the big males start uphill: the reason we found scattered three-pound birds in the high hopper meadows. The hens and younger birds follow, all eventually ending up in the high country alongside rutted-out bull elk. But the elk eventually drop a little lower during winter, whereas the blues tough it out near timberline until spring.
    Which is why when I was younger—when elk seemed far more important than any other fall objective, even university classes—I killed far more blue grouse with arrows and .30-06 bullets than with shotshell pellets. Yes, rifles remain generally legal for what the game departments call “forest” or “mountain” grouse in the West. These are not just blues but also ruffed grouse and the southern subspecies of spruce grouse called Franklin’s. In fact, there are Westerners who don’t believe that a forest grouse can be killed with a shotgun, just as there are Westerners who don’t believe that a pronghorn can be stalked with anything except a four-wheel-drive.
    I don’t feel guilty about taking mountain grouse with a bow or elk rifle, though. One time from a “drop camp” where some elkaholic friends and I had been horse-packed into a wilderness area, I found a mid-September covey of blue grouse that may never have seen a human. They were waddling up a tiny spring creek, feeding and chuckling along the way. I hiked ahead of them and, as they went by, shot the last one in line with a blunt arrow. The arrow went through and stuck in the earth on the far side of the creek, and the grouse keeled over. I retrieved the grouse and my arrow and circled ahead of the covey, again shooting the last bird in line. The rest of the covey never stopped walking or talking, and two blues were enough for three hungry elk hunters.
    There is nothing quite like a few blues to break up the typical diet of red meat in hunting camp, and I always have had the attitude that a blue or two in hand is better than a larger mammal hiding somewhere else, whether it be a mule deer in Colorado or a moose in British Columbia.
    These days, however, I spend more and more time each fall with a shotgun rather than a bow or rifle, partly because Montana eventually became civilized and now allows hunters to chase birds after big-game seasons end in November. This is close enough to the solstice that the sun in the blue-white sky barely rises above the mountain ridges, even at noon. There is usually just enough warmth, though, to keep the south-facing ridges mostly clear of snow—making the ridge ends both pleasant and logical places to hunt.
    On this particular day I was placing my bob-soled boots carefully on the icy shale outcrops along the edge of the conifers when an average-size bull elk rose from his bed on the end of the ridge looking for what was making the noise. It felt good not to have any reason to shoot him, although I automatically looked at the bull and then at the shadowed canyon below, gauging how I would take the quarters down. Then I sighed gratefully because it wasn’t necessary.
    Soon after the sigh, however, came an audible curse, when the elk finally decided that he should run away and his clatter chased a blue grouse from its perch in an out-of-range ponderosa pine. After pitching off, the grouse set its wings and soared downhill. I could see the gray bird clearly in the almost-warm sunlight before it disappeared into the shadow of the mountain to the south.
    As with the elk, I took what comfort I could from this, first by noticing that the direction the grouse had flown was more or less toward the pickup. I also realized that this late in the fall a grouse that had been feeding on conifer needles wouldn’t taste nearly as sweet as a grouse in September that had been munching on hoppers. As with the fox in Aesop’s fable, the unshootable “grapes” were obviously sour.
    Still when I started downhill toward the blue shadows I held my shotgun at port arms. There are ways, after all, of making a bitter grouse taste somewhat better . . . . Blue grouse and elk also resemble each other in reputation of flavor. To Westerners, they occupy the twin peaks of edible game, despite the fact that their flesh varies more from September to December than that of most other game.
    Both begin September tender and sweet, but in October they start to turn, bull elk because of the rut and blue grouse because of conifer needles. Thus, only truly hard-core hunters try to shoot blue grouse or big elk in November.
    There’s also something else involved. Recently, a professor in California made a study of human reactions to wine. Tastings were held with bottles unmarked except for price. Obviously, of course, the wines were of varying quality, having nothing to do with the prices. Not so obviously, the tasters were not only asked their opinion but also hooked up to magnetic resonance-imaging devices that measured their brainwaves. It turned out that when people claimed an “expensive” wine tasted better, their brain actually had experienced finer taste, even if the wine normally retailed for five dollars a bottle.
There is something of that in late-season blue grouse or elk hunting. The brain of the hunter insists that the prize of the chase tastes good, even when other people not so invested with boot-wear don’t experience the same brainwaves. This is why the average blue-grouse hunter searching for food more than from compulsion starts after the birds as soon as legally possible.
    For some, this means “catch-and-release hunting” with a fly rod in May, when the big blues hoot near the little cutthroat streams. Thus, we discover where some of the young coveys will be come September. Like most humans who just can’t stand not to be out there, the hunting never stops, and there is no one single purpose for searching the wild. Even if we don’t catch a trout in May, we might get the blues in autumn.

John Barsness lives in southwestern Montana with his wife—novelist and cooking writer Eileen Clarke—and his Labrador-and-English-setter mix, Gideon. He’s written seven books, including Western Skies, a collection of stories about wingshooting the West, and Shotguns For Wingshooting. He also is a staff writer for several magazines, including American Rifleman, Guns and Sports Afield.